Thank You For Your Support In Making Our Community's History Accessible!

Thank You

Thank You For Your Support In Making Our Community's History Accessible!

Libraries are not only places to get the newest titles or experience cutting edge technologies; they are also archives of our history. Digitizing issues of Seward County’s newspapers, dating from 1870, enables them to be posted online. This ensures that our local history becomes accessible to all. Over $30,000 is needed for this project and the library is asking for your help.

If you have important dates in your personal, professional, or civic past that were covered in a county paper, please consider making a $125 donation to cover the cost of converting the microfilm reel that includes your event (a reel usually includes at least one year of newspaper images) and having it posted online. This is a small price to pay to give everyone in the world access to Seward County coverage of:

Birth announcements

Wedding announcements

Graduations

Obituaries

Sporting events

Club events

Contest results

Election results

Business anniversaries or other promotions

Local happenings

Other newsworthy event

Once the microfilm content is posted online, it becomes searchable to all (using OCR or optical character recognition) and it is free to access and use! You can visit seward.advantage-preservation.com now to see examples of reels already online.

The Seward Library Foundation believes this to be an important project and has committed to match up to $15,000 in new donations to make this happen! With your help, our newspapers can be digitized before Seward and Seward County finish celebrating their 150th anniversaries in 2017.

You can donate to this project to help preserve our county’s history. All donations will be recognized in the Genealogy Room of the Seward Memorial Library and on this website. Donations are tax deductible within extent of prevailing laws. Click here to view a list of all available Seward County microfilm reels. To make a donation please mail your check for $125 per reel along with a note indicating your preference for the publication and year that you would like to have digitized to:

Seward Library FoundationP.O. Box 42Seward, NE 68434

About

The Mission & History Of The Seward Memorial Library

For several decades many people in the Seward community–especially the library director, the staff, and frequent patrons–saw the need for a new public library. Every year, the Fourth of July sale of used books in front of the old Carnegie building became a vivid reminder that for every new book purchased, one had to be discarded.

The original library structure located at 5th and Main was built in 1913 with funds from the Carnegie Library Commission. The original library building was overcrowded, provided minimal accessibility, had restricted parking, limited storage and cramped space. When compared to 20 communities of similar size, Seward ranked FIRST in rate of circulation, for both adult and childrens’ books, but ranked LAST in library square footage. A new multi-funcational, quality library building was greatly needed in Seward.

Wide-spread yearnings for a new building led to the establishment of the Seward Library Foundation in 1990. The Foundation came into being for one purpose: to provide more adequate library service for the community of Seward by looking into possibilities for a new facility. The first Foundation members were Arlo Bower, Doug Ellis, Duane Gabriel, Mike Hecker, Virginia Hughes, Becky Vahle, and Annette Wallman.